Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel

by Tiphanie Yanique

  Life was changed on the island. It was not something new. It was not something opening or awakening. It was an expired life—even though only three people had died between all three islands, and they had been tourists. We had to climb over people’s lives to get down the street. There were kitchen tables in the road. There were dressers crashed up against cars.

  And worst of all, those living in the valley could see the bare hills. There were houses there. So many houses! When had these been built? Who lived in them? And why were they so huge?

  These weren’t homes that connected to the step streets. These were way up. The townspeople just hadn’t been paying attention. Yes, they owned their land and their houses and yet, it was something to realize you were looked down upon. To realize, all of a sudden, that they didn’t live in the prime location anymore.

  Twenty-four hours after he walked out of the door, Papa Franky came home a hero but not dead. He picked up his wife and spun her around and told her, “Thank God for life.”

  Later the islands’ mantra was belted over the radio, sung in the breadlines and phone lines and taped onto packages of mosquito spray sent from Ronalda in the States—“Thank God for life!” It was declared that neighbors had saved each other. It was declared that the island community was returning to its old-time roots. We’d come together. We loved each other again. We knew each other. Like we had before. “Thank God for life!” The island was months without electricity. Months with the toilet-flushing water drawn from the cistern underneath the house. Months without tourists or the revenue they’d brought in.

  But secretly, no one wanted normalcy to return. Secretly, everyone felt this push backward in time was a savior, worth the sacrifice. We were looking to the past for the first time in a long time. And we were seeing something. Thank God for this life.

  Anette pressed everyone’s clothes by heating the iron over a small fire in the yard, protecting the clothes from charring by laying them under a tablecloth. Instead of watching the TV, the family told each other the stories Eeona had taught them. In young Frank’s version Anancy always shared everything equally with everyone at the end. In our usual version Anancy is tricky—would never share a thing, not a piece of fruit, not the deed to his big house on a hill. Papa Franky told about the seductress with a hoof foot, who, so the myth went, could sing like a piano. They had forgotten exactly how the myths went, but they told them anyway. Was the La Diablesse the same thing as a soucouyant? Was Anancy the spider man a Duene himself? Eve Youme listened and could feel the tingle in her toes. Her feet sometimes ached, as though they were trying to run away from her.

  Eventually FEMA stopped handing out bread and started passing out boxes of military rations—the food they’d given to the Army boys. Jacob, in his house that was now without rain gutters and without a balcony, poured water over his meat to inflate it and remembered eating similar trash many years before when he’d been bold and righteous. That was when he’d known he wasn’t second to any man. Now Jacob and his lovely wife ate at their large candle-lit dining table. They had a pricey generator that ran their necessities—the water pump, the lights on his wife’s vanity.

  Youme, in Frank and Anette’s house, ate her inflatable fruit cocktail and felt as though she were eating a sugared sponge. Me, who since she was twelve had always slept in shoes and socks and a panty even if she was naked otherwise, would save the fruit cocktail and bury it in the backyard while everyone slept and the whole island was dark. She thought maybe it might grow into something. If it didn’t, then it wasn’t fit for her to eat. She didn’t like the way it made her feel numb.

  As if out of respect for a woman as forceful as she, Hurricane Mary did no damage to Eeona’s inn on St. John. But the storm did flatten an octagon house on the forehead of a hill in Freedom City, St. Croix. The spider there crawled out and quickly webbed a new home, as Anancies do.

  Franky had offered to take a Guard boat over to check on Eeona, but Anette didn’t, really didn’t, like the idea of her husband going anywhere that wasn’t work-required without her. Not after she’d almost killed him with her mind. And with her fear of boats, she didn’t want to go with him either. Besides, there had been no reports of injuries or fatalities from that love island of St. John. The ferries were mainly taking dry goods and medicines back and forth so it was more than a month before the family had word of Eeona—and then it wasn’t word, it was Eeona herself arriving at their door.

  By the time Hurricane Mary reached the continental United States, she was much weakened by her travels. But the hurricane still brought the hurriedly built wood-and-sheetrock Continental houses down like so many dominoes. Mary killed many people in the U.S. But hurricanes do start off the coast of Africa, following a kind of triangle trade of their own.

  THE BOMB

  I rather walk and drink rum whole night,

  Before me go ride on LaBega Carousel.

  You no hear what LaBega say?

  “The people no worth more than fifteen cent a day.”

  —“LABEGA CAROUSEL”

  86.

  Somewhere on the scalp of a mountain on an island with a city called Freedom, a house with eight sides lay flat as though squashed by a foot.

  And somewhere deep in Frenchtown a boutique hotel with a restaurant on the ground floor revved up its generator and started cleaning oldwife and snapper that had been caught in the harbor. After the hurricane, many Americans on the island had been cradled off to civilization on the mainland by the federal government. It didn’t matter that the native islanders were also Americans—no islanders were welcomed on those flights out. But there were a few Continentals who did not leave—like Gertie’s new husband. Those were the ones who would later bristle when called outsiders and respond that they had survived Hurricane Mary and had stuck it out and that fact alone surely made them belong. Right now they were not sure about their decision to stay and right now they were eager to pay well for a decent meal and electricity and someone serving. The generator at Hibiscus Hotel and Restaurant roared like a monster and the fish sizzled in the pots.

  In Garden Street the Josephs had not heard of airplanes taking the real Americans back to the real nation. Only those meant to hear had heard. Kerosene lamps and battery-powered lamps worked together to cast geometric webs of light into the corners of the house. The radio said it would take many months for the islands to be reconnected to light and running water.

  Anette would wait for electricity as had Antoinette and Owen Arthur. She would wait for it like it was magic.

  Eeona arrived a month or so after Hurricane Mary had come and gone. When asked about her inn, Eeona said it was fine, just fine. When asked how she’d managed through the storm and how she’d managed on her own this month and half afterward, she’d answered the same.

  “I am here now because it is actually quite nice to be in St. Thomas without electricity. This is how it was when I was a child.”

  Everyone sat in the living room waiting for it to darken so that there was nothing left to do but sleep. Everyone was exhausted by seven, the whole island in bed by eight. Sitting in the dusk and kerosene lamplight, Eeona thought of her father coming home and telling her about the little girl whose hair rose to the sky when she held the magic balls of electricity. Anette remembered when the janitor had turned the lights off at that dance, remembered standing there in the dark, the sand-colored man beside her. And then she was remembering the dark night she lay with both her child and her lover. Then she looked out of the window and tried to conjure the appropriate shame.

  Youme, for whom electricity had not been a luxury but something accepted as natural—no different than the sun, really—lifted the rug in the middle of the living room and opened the cistern door. A generation ago they would have each gone to the public standpipe, and it was true that some were doing that now. But the Joseph cistern was huge and held enough water to spare them the standpipe queue. Eeona and Anette watched Me draw out her water. The girl was wearing white sock
s and black patent-leather shoes. Not only was Me wearing out a pair of clean socks, an excess now that everything was hand-washed, she was also dirtying the floor with her outside shoes. But Anette had allowed each child their little post-hurricane comfort. Young Frank was allowed to climb the one high coconut tree in the neighborhood that had survived the storm, pull down a nut, chop off its tip, and swig all the water and nyam all the jelly. Tree climbing was dangerous. But so was leaning over a hole in the floor and pulling up a heavy bucket of water.

  The family watched Me and held their breaths. But so what if Youme fell in? Couldn’t everyone in this family swim? Yes. But what if the cistern wasn’t quite full, and then falling in meant busting your head on the concrete bottom? Or what if there were scorpions or sea snakes at the base that would slither into your hair or, and this was what Auntie Eeona was thinking, slither into your vagina? Then what? Anette had repeatedly asked Youme to leave this chore to Papa Franky, but the girl insisted on this independence.

  Eve Youme fished her bucket carefully down until it was weighted with water. She heaved it up. As she stood, her brother came forth and closed the cover gently. He swathed it with the fake Persian rug. Even he felt that she should take off the stupid socks and shoes. Who wore such things in this heat, anyway?

  The cistern door in the middle of the parlor floor seemed inconveniently placed now that they drew water from the cistern for every bath, for every teeth brushing, for every water everything. Before, there hadn’t been much thought given to the cistern. But their water pump had dislodged and blown away, and how could it pump without electricity anyway? The pump was the family’s one casualty. It now lay intact in a yard two miles away, where another family would sell it and then they would sell it and then they would sell it and then when, weeks later, Franky went to Market Square to buy a used pump he would pay full price for the same one that had been his own.

  But for now Eeona was watching Eve Youme haul the bucket of water carefully to the bathroom. She had a kind of crooked gate, sexy almost in its openness. Her legs, thin but shapely, were like the limbs of trees that live at the neck of the ocean. No one criticized how much water Youme had drawn. It was evening, but it was really too much water to simply wash one’s feet, face, and teeth—which was all, really, one needed to do in the evening. They each took proper bucket baths in the late morning with water that had been left out in the sun to warm.

  But perhaps the water was to pour down the back of the commode, to flush away heavy waste and the smell of it. Though rainwater was scarce, ironic after all the flooding from the storm, no one minded a full bucket if it was for flushing. The bathroom now smelled of humanity. Though Anette scrubbed it down every two days, it was perfumed with stale water and fresh backside. At its best, it smelled of eggs boiling. But it had been many weeks with this smell and they had all become accustomed to it. Even just-reach Eeona, because the smell was familiar. They had used chamber pots when she was a girl.

  Eeona, who had a sense for her own, followed the girl to the bathroom. Eeona quietly twisted open the door and was not surprised to find Eve Youme squatting completely naked in the tub. The girl was dipping the washcloth into the bucket of water. With her aunt entering, Eve Youme stood in the expected surprise and the more curious defiance. Her own glinting pubis shone like a shield.

  Eeona was not surprised to see Youme’s special brightness. Nor was Eeona pleased. She herself had not fully figured out what the curse or the blessing might mean. “Me, you are silver at your private part,” Auntie Eeona said.

  Eve Youme, who was sure she had locked the bathroom door, nodded. Eeona, thinking the child wanted privacy, stepped in and closed the door behind her. This is not what Youme wanted. The girl wanted to be alone, to polish herself into a glory. But she was also hiding something else. She stood there guarding something that could not be seen.

  This boldness was so different than the hesitation Eeona had felt when her own mother discovered the silver, and yet this made it easier. “My dear, how long have you been like this?” Perhaps the words were not right. But what could be the right words for something so strange and wonderful?

  Eve Youme was not sure which thing her aunt was referring to, but she answered anyway, since the answer would be the same. “Since I was twelve.”

  “Does your mother know?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Not even your doctor?”

  For by now it was hard to hide a young woman’s body. Doctors could strip them naked. Doctors could even spread their legs and go tunneling inside. This was considered good health care.

  “The only doctor I know is Doctor McKenzie—my father.”

  The two women, one not a woman as yet, faced each other as though a mirror. There was a still intention in their forms. Eeona stepped forward. Eve Youme’s back was already to the shower wall.

  “Me, you are my special one. You may tell me anything. Has there been anything inappropriate in your relationship with that McKenzie?”

  No, Youme wanted to say. It’s not that at all. But instead she unfocused her eyes and stared at the door, willing her mother to come and save her. But then she remembered that this was all still a secret from her mother as well.

  A lesser woman than Eeona would have not noticed the dulling in the child’s eyes. Eeona noticed. “I understand. I understand, Me,” she said. But Eeona did not understand.

  The young woman, the child, started to cry. Her body did not reveal this. Only her face was suddenly flushing maroon and then a tear seemed muddy as it slipped down her face.

  “Shall I come to you, or would you rather step out? It is okay.” But it was not okay.

  Eve Youme stepped out of the tub. She looked down to direct Eeona’s gaze.

  Eeona could not help the intake of breath as she saw that where the toes should be, there was instead the smooth stump of a heel rounding out the front of Youme’s left foot. Then the girl rotated her leg and there were her five toes, elegant but pushing out frighteningly from where her heel should have been.

  “My child, a clubbed foot is something that can be fixed. It is nothing so . . .” But the lady who was always resourceful suddenly had no words as her niece lifted the backward foot and the foot began to turn with a slow creaking of bones, turning more, and as it turned slowly and slow, it also shifted a grinding shifting so that the location of the ankle shifted backward as the toes turned forward. Auntie Eeona exhaled her breath. “Eve Youme, are you causing that movement?”

  “I feel it,” said the child. “But I can’t make it. It just does.”

  “We must fix you,” said the aunt.

  The only doctor they knew was the child’s father.

  87.

  When Dr. Jacob McKenzie arrived, Papa Franky left to drink at the corner. The rum shop was open all day and served warm single barrel for cheap because that was all there was. Franky went and ordered little glass after little glass. He left because he didn’t want to be there in his own house, competing and losing.

  Jacob came in smooth. Stepped out of his clean car that ran on actual unleaded gasoline, unheard of since the hurricane. He leather-shoed up the steps, still strewn with debris, because there was just so much of it that it would take months to clean up. Jacob wore his white coat, but he looked straight ahead so the neighbors didn’t have a chance to ask him questions.

  Jacob and Anette did not say a word to each other, not for the entire time he was there in the house that Franky had built for her. For the first time she was ashamed of her house, and not because of the little hurricane wear. It was a nice house, but the living room was so small and the kitchen was so crowded and the only thing pretty on the walls were the misty pictures of the parents she had never even really known.

  But really, Anette was ashamed of herself. Her hair had been thinning since she had begun to dye it so many years before, and now it was no match for the luminous bush of Jacob’s younger wife who had been sighted a few times over the years at the American-styl
e supermarket. Anette had heated the iron over the gentle wick of the lamp and pressed the old white dress into newness. Did Jacob notice? It was the dress she’d worn years ago in the airport when he left her. She could not help herself. It was there in the closet when she opened it. Well, let us be honest. It was at the back of the closet. But it was a dress she had worn the last time she was Jacob’s. It was the dress she should have married him in. She still fit the dress. She fit into it too damn well.

  But Jacob, in his own white, walked past her, even though he felt the static in the air as their breathing rolled toward each other. He went to the room where Eve Youme sat on the bed beside her aunt. That harpy, Jacob thought, seeing Eeona holding the child’s hand. Anette followed but did not say a word. Young Frank watched his mother’s figure as she closed the door behind her in his face. Frank felt an instant and sticking hate for the doctor. Not because Dr. McKenzie was the only man let into the room that he could not go into. Not because Dr. McKenzie was Me’s rich father. But because this man had caused his mother to stuff herself into that graying dress that was too tight for her. It shamed the son.

  Oh, but if Anette had worn the red and yellow dress. Jacob had never actually seen her in that dress, though he had seen the movie poster. But Anette had not worn that dress because after the porn film she’d ripped the dress to shreds and thrown it out. Right now parts of it were disintegrating in the dump out in the Bovoni countryside. Other parts were being eaten by fish in the Caribbean Sea. But if Anette had worn that dress or any red dress, Jacob might have not made it back to his lovely wife that afternoon. He might have not been able to steady his firstborn’s backward foot on his knee and watch it twist and grind forward, as though this was a regular abnormality. He would not have been able to examine her silver through the child’s embarrassed weeping.

  They had to half draw the curtains and twist the louvers open to let in daytime light since there was no electricity. Nothing about the exam felt intimate and precious, as it should have. Eve Youme was weeping because no man had ever looked at her there, despite Eeona’s concerns, and now here was her father and her aunt and her tightly dressed mother, all in the room with the windows gaping, while the girl rolled down her sock and then rolled down her panties.